I recently became the manager for a large student housing building and the first thing that needs to be done is overhaul the wireless network for the building. The building is a 4 story (including basement) housing built in the 1980s with about 35 residential rooms and 45 residents. There is Cat5e running to each of the rooms and a central networking closet that contains a 48 port gig switch for all the Cat5e ports in the rooms. Currently there are 3 networks in the house, an old outdated Meraki setup that covers half of one floor, another separate Meraki system consisting of 3 MR32's and 2 MR18's that covers most of the 1st, 2nd, and third floor, and another separate Google WiFi setup the covers the basement, 1st, and 2nd floor (we have 6 pucks, although none of them talk to each other, they are all just broadcasting their own network). All the access points are just connected to the ethernet ports in residents rooms. The problem is there are dead spots in the house and poor connection in a lot of rooms.
Our Meraki license is about to expire and I am looking into replacing all the networks in the house with one unified Ubiquity network. Our budget is $3-4k. Based on my research my plan currently is to hire a recent college grad to come in and do a wireless survey, then buy a Ubiquiti 24 port PoE switch to add to the one in networking closet and a number of the UAP-AC-PROs to cover the entire space. These access points would be installed in the residents' rooms using the ethernet that is already run. My goal is to have one network that covers everywhere and allows people to roam through the space without having to disconnect and reconnect. I would also like basic management tools like per-device rate limiting.
My question is, is this the best way to achieve the result I want? Are there any tips or things I should look out for? Would this be within my budget? I have a basic understanding of networking but nothing special, and this is my first large scale networking project.
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